Tag: Pop Culture

In case you haven’t been following the “news,” it was recently announced clarified by the makers of Hello Kitty that she is, in fact, not a cat. Also, she apparently doesn’t have a mouth because she “speaks from her heart.”

Last time I checked you couldn’t eat with your heart, though. Check and mate, SANRIO! Also, in the children’s book my sister owns, the things Hello Kitty speaks from her heart have quotation marks. Is that grammatically correct?

Hello Kitty is also British, so I guess the correct pronunciation is “Aloe Ke-ey,” and then you jump in the air, tap your heels together and sweep a chimney.

Anyway, at the store the other day I saw this, and I thought, “Well, I guess if Hello Kitty is a little girl, that would explain why this mouse hasn’t been slaughtered.”

Except, you know, for the whole not having a mouth thing. I guess a cat without a mouth also couldn’t or wouldn’t have the motivation to slaughter a mouse. So I’m back to square one. Ooor, that mouse is really a 400lb Canadian man.

I was listening to my cable providers music on demand station, the oldies station, and a song named “Patches” came on. There’s apparently TWO songs from the era named Patches, but they aren’t about the same Patches because one’s a boy and one’s a girl. This particular Patches was about the girl one. Dickey Lee sings of, “Patches my darling of old Shantytown,” with whom he was planning a summer wedding. Did this wedding happen? NO! His parents forbade it for no reason, sings Dickey. WHY!!?????

Well, it turns out, as poor Dickey overhears:

“I hear a neighbor telling my father
He says, a girl name of Patches was found floating face down
In that dirty old river that flows by the coal yards”

Uh, ok then. Dickey then sings of joining her that evening blah blah blah. Anyway, I looked at the album they had listed for it and it was: Last Kiss: Songs of Teen Tragedy. All the great teen deaths are there, from Leader of the Pack to Teen Angel! So many dead teens!

There are fourteen songs on this CD. Each more tragic than the next. But, they forgot a few:

1. “Braces,” about a boy (Johnny) and a girl (Judy) who made out and got their braces stuck together and starved to death.

2. “Sunburned Cutie,” sample lyrics:

She thought it’d be ok
just a few hours of sun and fun
but she was out there the whole day

When her momma came looking for her
all she found was a towel and sunglasses
she was just a sunburned cutie, a sun tanning amateur

3. “Lil’ Escalator Girl,” he never learned her name, he was at the mall and saw her from afar, then her shoelaces got caught in the escalator and all her skin came off.

4. “Prehistoric Rebel,” lyrics, the spoken climax:

But, Johnny didn’t want to sweep the cave floor
He ran away.
His sabretooth pelt got caught in a branch.
I saw him struggling, but there was nothing I could do.
A t-rex got him and ripped him in half.
Now I have to go to the dance….alone.

5. “Goodbye My Bicycling Baby,” about a responsible teen who thought motorcycles were too dangerous but ironically dies in a bicycling accident.

6. “Scattering Susie’s Ashes.” That’s pretty self explanatory.

7. “My Little Teen Funeral Girl,” this is about a girl who’s at another teen’s funeral (parachute didn’t open) who dies in a freak folding chair accident at the cemetery.

8. “Mama, Since You’re Dying Anyway, Can You Get a Message to Johnny?” lyrics:

Mama, I’ve got a message for Johnny
I’ve written down every word
If you end up croakin’
can you pass it on to him?

The bible says you can’t bring
personal possessions to heaven
but maybe, just maybe,
you can bring
other peoples’ notes

9. “I’ll Never Forget You (Because the Death of A Boyfriend is Just Generally Something You Don’t Forget)”

10. “Soda Shop Angel,” this would have been the saddest of all the teen tragedy songs if there weren’t three verses about the singer continuing to send his food back for various reasons.

11. “Angel Angel,” about the ghost of a dead teenager (running with scissors mishap) being exorcised from the house he was haunting, thus “dying” again and becoming a double angel, very rare.

12. “Why Couldn’t the Fire Ants Have Swarmed Me, Instead?” a young man’s lament at a romantic picnic gone wrong.

Opening: “An island, somewhere in the Pacific, where an evil plan is brewing that will threaten 2/3 of the Earth.” – Narrator

Sculpin’s the name, freezing the Earth’s oceans is his game!

He’s got a hydro freeze ray and he’s not afraid to use it! And that he does.

You would think since the oceans are frozen, Aquaman is out of luck but no, he and Superman are working this case.

Turns out his jet ski also works as a snowmobile.

Superman spots a stranded freighter in the area where it was reported the oceans first started to freeze.

“Just before everything froze, we picked up a fast movin’ object on radar,” says the jolly round captain.

Notice that Superman forgot to put on his boots this morning.

The captain explains that the ship that caused the oceans to freeze kept moving on the ice and headed south. “The only thing south of here is Jungle Island and Storm Island,” says Aquaman. Those sound like fun putt putt courses.

Meanwhile, at Jungle Island…

“Our next operation is to cut up the ice into giant blocks with the heat laser and sell them to the barren desert countries of the world. The first delivery will be to the Gobi Desert.” – Sculpin

Whaaa? Who wants big chunks of frozen salt water filled with dead whales and sharks?

Aquaman arrives and knows exactly who it is. He uses a heat ray to “melt a tunnel through the ice” to get to Sculpin’s ship. He’s confident he’ll get through undetected.

Then, while hanging off the side of the ship, he swings himself up onto the boat and breaks free, and he looks SO proud.

And I have to begrudgingly admit, in the world of Super Friends, that’s pretty impressive considering they can rarely free or save themselves from anything.

Aquaman then uses the classic move of trapping the henchmen in lifesavers.

Well, that was short-lived.

Aquaman then gets hit with a freeze ray and we’re back to where we started.

Superman sees nothing at Storm Island and heads on over to Jungle Island.

Here’s your big worthless sheet of ice, where do you want it?

Sculpin heads off to the Gobi Desert to deliver the first ice package.

I think he’d make more money marketing that helicopter than can drag around humongous sheets of ice with one little cable.

Superman follows them to the desert.

“Later, at the Gobi Desert”

“Thanks, Superman. That’s what I call a warm greeting.” – Aquaman, after Superman frees him with his heat vision. He must have spent that whole time in the ice block coming up with that one.

Ohhh, Sculpin is then MELTING the water to create lakes and such in the desert. I guess. Anyway, he tries to escape and Aquaman chases after him.

Aquaman uses his telepathic powers on a whale. There are multiple problems here.

Also, if you look at the previous picture of the sheet of ice, it doesn’t look nearly thick enough to hold a whale.

Anyway, the whale catches Sculpin in his little underwater getaway mobile and returns him to Superman and Aquaman.

“Later, with the oceans of the world defrosted and back to normal” – Narrator

“I hope he learns that only through honest efforts can problems be solved without creating new ones.” – Aquaman

Yet again, they have Aquaman underwater doing a magic trick, this time with NEWSPAPER. As the newspaper would be a pulpy blob and therefore unusable, out of protest, I shall not waste another moment on it.

Introduction: “High above Tibet, over the Himalayas, a Tibetan airline jet fights its way through the turbulent stormy skies.” – Narrator

Lightning strikes the plane, and what’s supposed to be a bunch of sparks actually looks like a pretty bad flesh wound.

The captain is either really concerned about the plane or has just been shown his mustache in a mirror.

They decide to prepare for an emergency landing. Which, they accomplish, with somehow simultaneously having everyone safe and breaking the plane in half. Impressive.

And now they’re grounded and stuck in a blizzard. Looks like a job for…

Superman and Flash

“If it’s time you’re concerned with, my super speed will get me there in a flash.” – Flash. Get it? Flash? Like his name and also like the descriptive word?

“We’ll leave immediately!” – Superman, inviting himself along. The narrator says he streaks into the sky, but he DOES have his costume on.

But, there are more, much bigger holes.

Three guys shiver around a cracked door. One says, “we’ll freeze if we don’t get that door covered up.”

After some negative Nellie “they’ll never reach us in time” talk, we pan out to see…these guys!

T-t-t-tibetan Raiders! Dontcha just hate looking out of your freezing cold split-in-half plane thinking someone has come to rescue you only to find out they’re Tibetan Raiders. And on a MONDAY – that’s the worst (I’m taking creative license and assuming it’s a Monday).

FORGET ABOUT THE STUPID DOOR!

“Hurry, we must barricade the door! The Raiders prey on hopeless travelers!”

THE COMPLETE ASS-END OF THE PLANE IS OPEN! It’s right there, as clear as the mustache on the pilot’s face.

The Raiders humor everyone and easily pull the door down.

Meanwhile…

Superman and Flash aimlessly wander around looking for the downed plane. A lookout for the Raiders (these guys are better organized than the superheroes) spots them and warns the others.

Some of the Raiders drag the tail end of the jet away as a decoy, while the others bury the plane under an avalanche of snow. That’s cold. Sorry.

This is where the plan falls apart.

The Raiders don’t really have a good approach when it comes to overpowering superheroes. They try to lasso both Superman and Flash, and it doesn’t work (I gave them a 60/40 chance of it working).

The Raiders give the location of the buried plane up pretty easily. I was disappointed.

Superman and Flash find the plane, and from high above, the Tibetan Raider leader tells no one in particular out loud that they will soon also be buried along with the plane.

Nice try, but you’ve only provided Superman with the makings of the most obnoxious snowball fight snowball ever.

And he’s totally the type to throw this monster then immediately tell everyone he can hear his mom calling him home for dinner.

Flash digs out the plane and they save the day. Then, Flash tells them that “if you ever need us, we’ll be back in a flash.” Ok, dude, this story is like six minutes long – that’s one too many puns, and the same pun, too.

Let me ask you this: let’s say you’re Wonder Woman, and you’re flying around in your invisible jet, as you like to do, and you see two young boys in a backyard messing around on the lawn.

Nothing to see here…or is there?

Do you:

A. Think, “how nice, some kids are getting some fresh air camping in the back yard.”

or

B. Think, “holy fucking shit, those kids are gonna eat some weeds from the yard!”

Well, I’ll have you know if you answered A – you are a shitty Wonder Woman and you have two weed-eating kids’ fates on your head. And if you answered B – good for you although how in the hell you knew from that distance they were gathering random plants to eat is a little confusing.

“Uh, that looks like trouble down there,” you’d say, inexplicably able to differentiate two kids digging in the yard for worms and two dummies collecting grass to eat.

And, you’d be right! Impressive.

“These are gonna make great salad greens for our camp out supper,” one says to the other, proving you to be an insightful and not in any way paranoid Wonder Woman who maybe just assumed because you didn’t want to actually do any work saving anybody that day.

“I wouldn’t eat those if I were you, some of the plants growing in yards are dangerous or even poisonous if you eat them,” you’d say, all smug.

“Maybe we should ask my mom for some salad stuff out of the refrigerator,” the child would respond. And for some reason you wouldn’t be suspicious of two young boys who seem to be obsessed with eating salads for dinner – surely they are pod people/alien imposters, but oh no, why do any extra work?

No, you get back in your jet, head back to the Justice League and clock out, feeling you’ve done your superheroing for the day.